Never Miss A Story.

Daily Edition

Tykwer's 'Drei,' Kafka adaptation get subsidy

As well as adaptation of best-selling author Daniel Kehlmann

COLOGNE, Germany -- Tom Tykwer's menage a trois drama "Drei" (Three) and new adaptations of Franz Kafka and Daniel Kehlmann were among the projects backed in the latest round of funding by regional subsidy body Filmstifftung NRW.

The NRW film board signed a €400,000 ($600,000) check for Tykwer's latest -- the director's first German-language film since "The Princess and the Warrior" (2000). The drama, starring Devid Striesow, Sophie Rois and Sebastian Schipper focuses on a 40-something couple in Berlin who, separately, fall in love with the same man. "Drei" has already secured around $1 million in subsidies from the Berlin-Brandenburg Medienboard and some $750,000 from federal film board the FFA.

Jochen Alexander Freydank, an Oscar winner for his 2007 short "Toyland," picked up €225,000 ($336,000) in backing from NRW towards his feature debut, an adaptation of the unfinished Kafka short story "The Burrow." The drama, which follows a mole-like man who has shut himself off from the outside world, stars Dominique Horwitz, Robert Stadlober, Nicolette Krebitz, Fritz Roth and Ken Duken.

Isabel Kleefeld's adaptation of "Ruhm" (Fame) from best-selling author Daniel Kehlmann ("Measuring the World") received €70,000 ($105,000) in development cash from NRW. Kehlmann is a hot property at the moment. Six years after the worldwide hit "Good Bye, Lenin!," Wolfgang Becker is returning to the big screen with an adapting of Kehlmann's "Me and Kaminski" starring Daniel Bruhl.